Just like those who battled for worker rights after the garment fire, we must stand now and demand a full civil trial, with full disclosure of the facts, surrounding the BP Deepwater Drilling Disaster.

The fossil fuel industry is getting uneasy. The climate movement is growing by leaps and bounds, as more and more people (80 percent of Americans) connect the dots and begin to understand the nature of the threat.

At some point, the DEC will have to make a decision on whether to allow fracking and the EPA will have to address the environmental consequences of the practice. How they decide these issues will indicate whether or not our institutions are still independent.

In the southern Amazon basin of Ecuador, the air is filled with the sound of macaws and the distant sound of thunder. But as soon as next year, the metallic hammering of oil drills may join the chorus. Local indigenous leaders are dead-set on not letting that happen.

Americans have returned a clean energy champion to the White House, but they didn't stop there. All the way down the ticket, voters overwhelmingly favored candidates who support clean energy, clean air, and strong public health safeguards.

This is a victory for all Americans who want to breathe clean air, drink safe water, and protect treasured landscapes. And it is a setback for the fossil fuel companies that invested so heavily in this election and have so little to show for it.

Part of the oil industry clearly wants to return to the era when secrecy was acceptable, when companies and governments kept details of their transactions to themselves. Big oil companies are increasingly isolated in this approach.

Maligning Al Gore for making shrewd investments is silly. But trying to poison public opinion about the need to promote clean energy alternatives with what we know about climate change? That's irresponsible.

After forty years of standing up for nature, forty years of progress, Robert Redford still looking forward. Still focused on the work we have to do. Still driven by that same passion that first stirred him as a boy in the Texas hills.

In talking recently with climate expert Michael Mann, I realized that our conversation was nothing short of a roundabout tour in an effort to identify just how the well-funded climate denial machine has become a Catch-22 phenomenon.

When fact-checking organizations tend to find many more conservative lies than liberal ones, rather than respond that conservatives tell far more lies, the fact-checkers go looking for liberal fabrications and find them whether they exist or not.